By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
The page reimagines arrival and colonizing movement against a deeper indigenous continuity tied to wind, birth, remembered source, and protected peace.
Ships, masts, and sea might suggest exploration or conquest, but the page resists that frame by making the sun, wind, and ancestral origin more exacting than imported motion. Its insistence that 'we the god's have favoured Fiji' shifts authority away from the voyagers and back to a native sacred order that precedes them and protects Fiji's peace.
Frame-script page 9 folds colonial arrival back into the gods' own account. 'They came in / ships across the / space of sea, / but the petrified / masts still have / not the precision / of the sun,' the man's voice insists, then asserts indigenous priority in capitals: 'WE WERE the / beyond, AND they / came- pushed / by their own, / Lord of wind.' The conclusion reclaims authority from the voyagers: 'life / has changed, but / we the god's have / favoured Fiji; for / we have remem- / bered our source / with her birth, / And thus protected / her peace.' The arrival of outsiders is reframed not as conquest but as something the older, native sacred order outlasts and guards against.